Amazon offers Nvidia Grid 3D acceleration today

Nvidia Grid was always quite an attractive idea. You get a server packed with high-end GPUs that can render your professional applications or games and send a video feed back to your computer. This is that Nvidia had in mind with Gamestream, with one difference - Grid can be anywhere in the web and will work with your internet connected device all over the world. Of course your internet connection will be crucial for this task as you will need a stable and reliable connection of a few Mbits to have a fluent picture of what is being rendered on the Grid.

Amazon has just announced a newcomer to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G2 instance that delivers GPU acceleration to users running graphics intensive applications and games in the cloud. This is a big win for Nvidia as Amazon is one of the leaders in Cloud computing.

The users of Nvidia GRID GPUs and Amazon SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies will be able to use 3D GPU accelerated for customers that needs extreme graphics performance for design, virtualization, media creation, games and more. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will offer this 3D acceleration service as of today, AWS is offering an NVIDIA GRID GPU instance, known as the G2 instance, via its Amazon EC2 cloud, starting today.

"AWS sees a growing benefit for adding GPUs to our cloud," said Matt Wood, general manager of Data Science at AWS. "The NVIDIA GRID GPUs in our new G2 instances enable graphical applications to be rendered in the AWS cloud and streamed to a world with increasing internet bandwidth and proliferation of device types."

Nvidia Grid is based on the Kepler architecture with a powerful H.264 encoding engine that can enable high resolution graphics compressed in real time and streamed to any internet connected display. Nvidia says a few PCs, Macs, tablets, the Shield console, smart TVs, micro-consoles or smartphones will get the chance to see the performance of the Amazon AWS powered by Nvidia Grid. Let us remind you that gameplay on Shield is doing exactly the same thing inside your home, while Amazon lets you stream applications and games via the could.

There is a need for middleware to make everything running smooth onto these G2 instances and this one is called OTOYs ORBX that enables Windows- and Linux-based Amazon Machine Image (AMI). (So many new abbreviations G2, OTOY, AWS, EC2, AMI make it really easy for the average consumer to understand the tech behind it. Ed.)

Software-as-a-service companies should be able to install their applications into OTOYs AMI and behind streaming to web browser within minutes.

To show the potential of app streaming Nvidia GRID, OTOY and Autodesk are collaborating on technology that offers most popular Autodesk applications through OTOY AMI. OTOY is a LA based company that just got into news as Eric Schmidt of Google joined its advisory board. The company is known for offering cloud based rendering to movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Spider-Man 3 and The Social Network. (Facebook movie animation? Hope it can render me two hours of my life back. Ed.)

This definitely sounds interesting, we wonder how do they plan to work out the business model and who gets what kind of money for having Auto CAD or 3ds Max on my computer powered by Nvidia latest cards, on ones Intel integrated based PC, all via the internet.

There is no doubt that this is the future of the professional 3D market and a part of the future of 3D gaming.